


Palladium Heart

by TigerDragon



Series: Ironclad [2]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bisexual Character, F/F, PTSD, Rape Recovery, Sexual Tension, Technology, Workplace Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-17
Updated: 2012-06-27
Packaged: 2017-11-05 13:31:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/407002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Antonia Stark is back from Afghanistan, but things at home aren't any less complicated than her captivity abroad. Obadiah Stane has all but declared war on her new direction for Stark Industries, things with Pepper are... evolving... and what Toni's working on in her garage might just change the world.</p><p>Assuming it and she live long enough, at least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome back to _Ironclad_. As usual, we don't own any of the characters or IPs involved here, but we've enjoyed our little sojourn into this world so far and we very much hope you continue to enjoy it. Thank you for your support and comments, and feel free to keep letting us know what you think!

Pepper Potts woke to her phone ringing, and for a good minute or so all was right with the world. Hotel room, nothing new there. Her Stark Mercury at its maximum two feet of distance from her body and playing a cheery ringtone, business as usual. Her boss grumbling at her from the other side of the bed--  
  
Pepper sat bolt upright, remembering the events of the past night. Fortunately she didn’t have long to mull them over, because her phone insistently reminded her that she hadn’t answered it yet.  
  
“Morning, Happy.” Years of practice helped her keep her voice steady and sounding like she had woken up more than ten seconds ago.   
  
“Hi, Pep. How’s the Big Apple?”   
  
Getting up, she left Toni’s room for her own. “The board meeting went well, I think. Toni says it went according to plan, anyway.” Phone clutched between her ear and shoulder, she pulled the day’s clothes out of her suitcase. “I got to see a show last night.”   
  
“Great. I’m glad.”  
  
Pepper frowned at his tone.  “Happy?”  
  
He coughed. “It, uh, might be awhile before you can relax again.”  
  
She stopped, hand on her hip, blouse hanging from her fingers. “Because?”  
  
“Stane.” Happy sighed. “He’s filed a lawsuit against Toni. Trying to prove her not fit to head the company.”  
  
Dragging in a long breath through her nose, Pepper counted to ten. “She thought he might. Okay. Have we lawyered up and do we have the PR team on it?”  
  
“Yes and no. Toni hates it when we do PR stuff without you.”   
  
A small smile cracked through Pepper’s anger. “Okay. I’ll go wake her up and give her the sit rep. Thanks for letting me know right away.” She glanced at the clock on the bedside. You couldn’t file a lawsuit before eight in the morning. Stane must have gone public only minutes ago.  
  
The world’s most competent assistant took a few minutes to dress before returning to Toni.  
  
“News?” Her boss was awake in spite of the hour - unusual for her, but not unheard of - and was half-rolled in a sheet that didn’t do nearly enough to cover her for Pepper’s peace of mind. From the tone of her voice, she didn’t expect anything good.  
  
“Stane filed a suit challenging your mental capacity.” To calm herself, Pepper started her usual sweep of Toni’s room, making sure no phones or proprietary tech or evidence of their sharing a room were left behind. She’d have to ruffle the covers in her own room after she packed. “We have lawyers on it but still need to counter the PR angle.”  
  
“Which, you’re going to tell me, involves less of me playing hermit in the garage and more of being seen around the beautiful people who couldn’t possibly be crazy.” Toni didn’t do anything to cover herself, but she didn’t show off either. Thank heaven for small favors. “Am I getting warm?”  
  
“Torrid.” Getting up from checking under the bed--on the side opposite Toni--Pepper nodded. “The completely sane beautiful people, probably a pleasant and snarky interview or two, maybe a meeting with somebody important and stodgy. Nothing says credibility like stodge.”  
  
“If I’m going to parties,” Toni informed her more than a little grumpily, “you’re coming. Wearing something nice.”  
  
Throwing a fresh set of clothes at her employer--something she’d done many times before so it didn’t feel so much like a desperate attempt to lower her blood pressure--Pepper smiled. “Buy pretty things on the company dime? I can do that. If I get a new dress for every party, I won’t even whine about the vapidity of it all.”  
  
“Two dresses. You can pull a quick-change in the middle of each party if it’ll make you feel better.” Toni sliding out of the bed without bothering to pull anything on first. Usually, it occured to Pepper about then, she was busy tossing someone out of her boss’s room during the dressing stage. Therefore not standing right in front of her.  
  
Toni stretched.   
  
Pepper stared. It was only a second, and she executed a very casual-seeming turn away to her own room.  
  
It fooled exactly no one. She knew it. Toni knew it. She knew Toni knew. Et cetera.  
  
Damn.  
  
Striding to her untouched bed, she tore the covers off, rumpled the sheets, and re-packed her suitcase with a bit less care than usual.  
  
By the time she got out to the front room of the suite, Toni was dressed in the day’s power suit and sipping fresh coffee while a bellhop unpacked the room service breakfast. She looked up, caught Pepper coming in, smiled. It was a strange, sad, ruefully laughing smile, but it was still Toni’s.   
  
“Breakfast is on, Miss Potts. I believe the ostrich omelette with Portobello and arugula is your favorite?”  
  
It smelled heavenly.  Pepper grinned. “I’m impressed, boss. I thought you could barely remember your own breakfast orders.”    
  
“I hacked your phone remotely.” Toni’s smile warmed and sharpened, some of the arrogance coming back into it. “You do your room service ordering by text.”  
  
Swallowing a mouthful of omelette, Pepper eyed Toni. “Y’know, that could absolutely be true or you could just be messing with me. I never know with you.”  
  
“Do you really want to, Miss Potts?” Toni took another swallow of her coffee and actually grinned.  
  
Shaking her head, Pepper reached for her 100% organic, fresh-squeezed orange juice, deliberately not noticing that Toni still hadn’t done up her top buttons. “Maybe one day, Toni. In the meantime, plausible deniability is the way to go.”


	2. Chapter 2

The Firefighter Family Fund Benefit was their fourth party in six days, the latest in what Toni had taken to referring to as ‘the Pepper Potts PR Party Parade’ with just enough of a hunted look in her eyes that Pepper had been tempted to cancel more than once. So far, though, only tempted. Toni had left the arrangements to her, vanishing into her garage at every available opportunity, and she had at least once seriously considered confiscating her boss’s laptop.  Again, though, it hadn’t quite crossed the line yet. Maybe tomorrow.  
  
So she’d gotten dressed, laid out Toni’s clothes, harangued her with e-mail reminders all day and gotten increasingly terse replies.   
  
Everything had been going more or less to plan, truth be told, until they were practically out the door to the event.  
  
“No,” Toni told her on the steps to the limo, “absolutely not. No chance. No. Get back in the house.”  
  
Pepper closed her eyes for a moment. She didn’t try to bodily drag Toni to the limo, but she didn’t let go of her boss’ arm, either.   
  
“Why not?” Her voice was as steady and patient as she could make it. She’d already explained any number of reasons why it was a good strategic move, but Toni hadn’t been forthcoming about her reluctance.  
  
“That dress,” Toni told her bluntly, “is not coming with us.”  
  
Hand to her forehead, Pepper sighed. “I sent you a picture. You said it was fine.”  
  
“The picture was fine.” Toni gave her an exaggeratedly patient look. “The dress is not fine.”  
  
“Hm.” Pepper gave Ms. Stark a steady look. “Well,” she said, checking the time on her phone, “I guess it won’t hurt us to be a bit more fashionably late. I can change into the green Givenchy if you’d rather.”  
  
“The one with the skirt slit up to your hip?” Toni bit down her lip. It looked like it might have been hard enough to hurt, actually. “And that little semi-corset jacket thing?”  
  
Pepper nodded, suppressing a grin. Apparently the torment went both ways. “Or the black Gaultier.”  
  
“The strappy one with the gloves?” Now Toni’s cheeks were starting to go red and her jaw was visibly working. This was new. Concern about Pepper’s wardrobe had not been a theme of their working relationship.  
  
Assuming that ‘working’ was the right word for it anymore.  
  
Pepper decided to take mercy. “I’ll wear this one, shall I?”  
  
“Yes,” Toni capitulated with ill-humor, “blue and backless is absolutely the order of the day. I’ll just mumble my way through my meet and greets, then.”  
  
“Oh, you’ll be fine.” Pepper gently tugged Ms. Stark in the way of the limo. Luckily, she’d planned for this.  
  
“I love the color,” she said as she slid onto her seat and picked up a silky indigo wrap. “It goes with that shawl you got me in Paris.”  
  
Toni stared at her for a good forty seconds before indignant laughter finally burst through her surprise. “Miss Potts,” she finally got out, “I hope you have your resume updated.”  
  
“Really.” There was a distinct mischief to Pepper’s smile. “That would be a shame, the company devolving into chaos like that.”  
  
“Somehow, I’d manage.” Toni was trying to mix grinning and glaring, which wasn’t working very well.  
  
“You couldn’t find your shoes without me.”   
  
“I can hire people for that. Archaeologists or something.”  
  
Pepper couldn’t suppress a giggle at that. “I’m sure you could. Archaeologists to find your stuff, event planners for your parties and meetings, PR specialists for your outside communications, a forger for all the stuff you refuse to sign, and a full rotation of drivers to shlepp them all around with you. What’s your Social Security number, by the way?”  
  
“Five...” Toni paused. Frowned. “Five something something three two something something something seven.”  
  
“I can see you’ve got everything under control.” Pepper touched up her lipstick, took out her phone, and started tapping away.  
  
“Pepper,” Toni said three miles later, her face turned to the window and her voice almost lost in the roll of the wheels, “I could hire someone for that, too, but where would I hire someone to trust?”  
  
Pepper turned to give Toni’s profile a look of mixed sadness and care. “You’ve got me, Toni. Always will, even if you do fire me for teasing you.”  
  
Toni smiled into her own reflection, her eyes tracking the incoming traffic as they slowed down for the city, and she reached out in silence to wrap her hand around Pepper’s. They stayed like that what might have been a moment or might have been forever, until the car’s noise dropped to an idling hum and the blaze of photographers’ lights lit up the air outside.   
  
“If I did,” Antonia Stark murmured, “then I’d have to hire someone to do that for me, too.”  
  
She was out of the car and headed up the steps before Pepper quite recovered from the low intimacy of the way she’d said it.  
  
Luckily, the throng of press, groupies, and Beautiful People held up Ms. Stark long enough for her to catch up without looking like she was running after her boss. That never looked good, and she’d already caught a particularly bald spot of black and white holding court on the carpet.  
  
“Cueball, 11 o'clock,” she whispered in Toni’s ear.  
  
“Got it.” Toni picked up her pace slightly, a lengthening of her stride that looked more relaxed than forceful, and arrived in the middle of Obadiah's spiel about the importance of responsible corporate governance. “You’ll have to excuse Mister Stane,” she told the reporter cheerfully, “but he has to help me crash our party. Something about a pack of young ladies desperate for a strong older man.”  
  
“Look at you.” Obadiah’s smile was just about thin enough to shave with if you put an edge on it. “Toni, what a surprise. I didn’t think you were feeling up to public events.”  
  
Antonia turned and gave the reporter a confidential smile. “You’ll have to excuse Mister Stane for that, too; he doesn’t follow Twitter, and CNN hasn’t quite gotten around to covering my social schedule.”  
  
Pepper stood a half-step behind Toni wearing her press release smile. Reaching into her sparkly clutch, she brought out a handful of Ms. Stark’s business cards and handed one to the reporter like it was the key to Candy Mountain. “You can follow all the latest developments here. Don’t miss the Aether demo video!”   
  
“Meet you inside,” Toni tossed off cheerfully as she brushed past Obadiah. “I’ll do my best not to disrupt the mob waiting to ravish you.”  
  
The reporter broke objectivity enough to snicker, and his camera-man elbowed him. Obadiah flushed. Toni took the score and strolled up the stairs, looking for all the world like she belonged there.  
  
“I almost feel sorry for him.” Pepper’s calculated expression showed the slightest hint of a smirk.   
  
Toni waved her hand airily, pitching her voice to carry. “When you’re his age and washed up, Miss Potts, you have to take it where you can get it. We can all be glad he hasn’t resorted to waving a wad of cash around and chomping one of those cigars like a hard-up Daddy Warbucks.”  
  
Suppressing a snicker, Pepper gave the glittering room a slow, sweeping look, firing off battle plans with smile firmly in place. “Ok, boss. Start with the firefighters themselves, then move to the donors, then the telecom execs. Everyone else can wait.”  
  
“Right. Got it.” Toni started for the bar instead. “I need a drink first.”  
  
Pepper nodded to cover her concern. “Fair enough. I’ll pave the way. You’d better be there to back me up.”  
  
“I’ll be there,” Toni threw over her shoulder, not even turning around. If Pepper hadn’t been used to watching Toni Stark, it would have been an insignificant detail; nobody else would have thought anything of it. Even for Pepper, it took half the length of the room before she caught it.  
  
Toni walked to the bar with her hands folded behind her back, fingertips of her left hand gripping the wrist of her right, and the skin where her fingers pressed was red-rimmed white with pressure.  
  
Pepper’s mouth pressed into line for a moment. Everyone on the ‘must see’ list suddenly got their face time with the executive of Stark Industries cut in half. If she did it right, she could get Toni seen and heard and away in half an hour.  
  
She caught blonde movement by the bar. Flash of light on something - photographs, maybe? Hard to tell when she was busy arranging the reception line. Toni was coming back across the room - that was a good sign. Mostly a good sign. Hopefully.  
  
Toni’s hand caught her across the waist in a very unprofessional way. “Dance with me,” her boss whispered in a voice that wasn’t inclined to take no for an answer. “Right now.”  
  
Pepper’s professional smile crinkled at the edges for a moment as she let Toni sweep her out onto the dance floor.   
  
“Toni.” She tried not to grit her teeth. “Why am I not introducing you to the nice firemen?”  
  
“There’s a town called Golmira. Friend of mine used to be from there back before he died.” Toni’s face was blankly pleasant, half a smile on her lips, but her voice was a thicket of razors and iron. “A group of foreign mercenaries - thugs, really - just took the place over yesterday. Killing the men, taking the women and the kids for God knows what. Brown University over there just tagged me with the photos.”  
  
“Toni...”  
  
“They’re loaded with our stuff, Pepper. My stuff.” Toni’s hand tightened around Pepper’s waist, not quite enough to hurt. “Stuff they didn’t get off the back of a truck.”  
  
Letting the smile fade, Pepper squeezed Toni’s hand. “You think there’s a profiteer somewhere in the supply line? We can tell the DOD but there’s not much else we can do.” As they glided through the crowd a cadre of press came into view, cameras at the ready, and Miss Potts scraped together a cheerful facade. “Smile like you mean it, boss.”  
  
Toni flashed them a mechanistically perfect PR smile, twirling her secretary through one of the more complicated figures of the dance, and the whisper she breathed into Pepper’s ear was lost in the rise of the music. “There’s something else _I_ can do. So I need to get out of here.”  
  
For a moment Pepper just concentrated on the steps, determined to put on a good show. If the campaign to convince the world of Toni’s soundness of mind failed, it wouldn’t be because of her.   
  
Halfway through the next spin, Toni’s words caught up to her. It was only the years of navigating ‘creative chaos’ in pumps that kept Pepper on her feet.   
  
Stepping in close, lips inches from Ms. Stark’s ear, she murmured in a voice half shocked, half furious. “Toni. You are not planning what I think you’re planning.”  
  
“All right, Pepper. I’m not planning what you think I’m planning.” Toni leaned in close - very close - until her lips were practically against Pepper’s jaw and every camera in the place was pointed at them. “Feel better?”  
  
Turning her face into Toni’s hair, Pepper squeezed her eyes shut. “No, you ass.” Hands tight on Toni’s shoulders, she hissed angrily into her ear. “You’re willing to risk your life? The future of Stark Industries? The futures of everyone involved?”   
  
“Yes.” Toni drew back just enough for Pepper to see the hard brown metal of her eyes, the subtle set of her jaw that was as immovable as granite. “If I don’t go out there and stop those fuckers when I’ve got the tools sitting in my basement - if I just let them take my weapons and kill those men and treat those women and kids like the same sort of prize I was - then Brown University over there is right and I might as well just be a fucking ironmonger like Stane. We’re gonna change the world, Pepper, but that doesn’t mean I get a pass on what I turned loose in it before I woke up.” She let out a breath, the heat of it feathering Pepper’s cheeks, and then she leaned in and kissed her assistant hard on the lips. “Now,” she husked into Pepper’s mouth, “I need you to slap me.”  
  
“That’s easy,” the redhead muttered, then brought up her hand in a tightly sweeping arc that connected with a surprising solidity. Toni’s head whipped to the side with the force of the blow, and the entire room came to a screeching halt around the new epicenter of drama.  
  
“Good night, Ms. Stark.” The bartender could have mixed drinks with the ice in Pepper’s voice.  
  
Toni reached up and rested her fingers on the bruise already forming across her jaw, her expression a picture-perfect mix of arrogant shock and petulant anger, and she stood there for a neatly calculated seven seconds - about long enough for a really good photographer to get three shots - before letting her hand drop. “Good night, Miss Potts,” she growled between her teeth, and then made a show of storming past the bar before heading for the valet pick-up with a liberated bottle of whiskey in her hand.  
  
A classic Stark exit. The crowd went metaphorically wild.  
  
It took Pepper four hours to politely deflect most of the press, actually speak to the three reporters whose take on the story would be the most beneficial to her PR campaign, and butter up the telecom big wigs. Another hour was spent in what would have been a genuinely enjoyable conversation with the firefighters if it weren’t for the worry and anger churning in her stomach.   
  
She didn’t know how, but she was going to make Toni pay for this.


	3. Chapter 3

The Gulmira story made one news network in a big way - enough that Toni could leave it on in the background while she worked. It was pointless, self-flagellation at its worst, but she needed the rage. She needed the focus. She needed not to remember the look on Pepper’s face when she’d walked off the dance floor and not to think about the last time she saw the faces of men like the ones being caught on the shaky shoulder-cam shots and cellphone camera clips being strung together so ‘decent’ people all over the world could be properly horrified.  
  
Toni Stark wasn’t interested in being horrified. She needed to be something harder and sharper than skin and bone for what she was going to do, something with a mind of meshed gears and a hawk’s eyes, and she needed her hands to be steady and sure.  
  
When she took the glowing ring of the miniaturized arc reactor from her own chest and locked the new model into place, they didn’t tremble at all.  
  
“JARVIS, give me a read.”  
  
“The new reactor is generating three hundred percent more power, Ms. Stark, and deionizing fifteen percent less water per minute. It is an unqualified success.” It was often a struggle to remind herself that JARVIS wasn’t a true artificial intelligence - its emulation of a real personality was so sophisticated that sometimes she half-suspected she’d outdone herself and created something genuinely outside the bonds of heuristic programming. Moments like this, when its voice evinced what sounded for all the world like real pleasure at the success of her upgrade.  
  
“It ought to be. When I built the last one, all I had was scrounged palladium and mismatched machine tools in a cave. Anything less than success would have been downright embarrassing.” The joke sounded strange in her mouth, like it had slipped out bloody and cut from a nest of barbed wire. She swallowed, hard, and looked at the TV one more time. “Is she ready, JARVIS?”  
  
“The Aegis Personal Protection and Extraordinary Response System Mark III is fully functional, Ms. Stark, and I have been completely uploaded. Please note, however, that there are still terabytes of calculations necessary before field testing would be advisable.”  
  
She reached down and peeled off her tanktop, then reached for the button on her suit pants. “Sometimes, JARVIS, you just have to jump in and see if you can figure out how to swim. Spin her up, and be ready to fix on fail.”  
  
“Yes, Ms. Stark.”  
  
The skinsuit came first - clinging black fabric, built for temperature control and G-force management, her personal replacement for the bulky G-suits the Air Force insisted on using because they didn’t quite trust nanofiber yet. Stark test pilots had been using them for the last two years, but the Pentagon had never gotten on the train. Well, she was out of the business now anyway, so too bad for them. The waste disposal connections weren’t the least bit of fun, even with the luxury of taking her time on them, but if you wanted to fly you had to get used to things like that.  
  
Toni Stark had been flying jet trainers and full-up fighter jets since she was sixteen years old and was well past being squeamish.  
  
She flexed her gloves, verifying on the holoprojection screen that had followed her over that the motion sensors built into the suit were working properly, then doubled back across the room to the hatch over the fabrication machinery she’d customized for this and let out a long breath. “All right, JARVIS. Execute program Assembly 1.”  
  
The hatch separated, flipping its central frame, and she stepped into the waiting segmented boots with a tiny breath - the first model, she’d had to be bolted into, but she’d done this before with the Mark II model. That had been a stripped down prototype for the flight system; this was something else entirely. Seven and a half feet of gold-titanium alloy as an outer shell, backed up by the most sophisticated compartmental armor system on the face of the planet and fortified by a high-energy electromagnetic and charged particle shell - continually regenerated ablative “armor” for the hard metal beneath. It was the closest thing she could make it to invincible, and that didn’t begin to account for the firepower she’d loaded it with. The arc reactor’s power yields made all sorts of things possible that weight and energy demands would have rendered ludicrous on any previous platform, which made her Aegis the most dangerous piece of hardware on the planet by at least three orders of magnitude.  
  
That didn’t even account for what she’d done with the software.  
  
She closed her eyes, leaned her head back slightly and let armor enclose her again. It was every kind of relief in the world. It was something she couldn’t have explained to Rhodey even if he knew about the suit, couldn’t even explain to Pepper now - that out in the world, surrounded by all the glitter and light and conversation she’d loved so damn much for the thrill, all she felt now was trapped and locked in and in fucking danger all the time. Motion in her peripherals, a sharp burst of laughter, the clatter of a glass, the heat of a man’s eyes when he looked at her.... it was like salt on flayed skin. The only time she’d felt right in the last month was encased in armor plating and watching the world through Aegis’s holographic HUD, preferably from 15,000 feet or higher.  
  
PTSD, she was fairly certain, didn’t even start to cover it.  
  
Blue and silver light blossomed around her, JARVIS booting the HUD now that the helmet was properly mated to the torso unit, and she flexed her hands slowly to test the responsiveness of the Augmented Motion Response sensors - the nerves of the suit, the interface that let her body’s motion and the armor’s action be one and the same thing. Clean test: green lights. Perfect.  
  
The fabrication system finished its work and retracted into the floor, freeing up the motion inhibitors that had kept the suit still during assembly, and she dropped to one knee to bring herself into a position not unlike a sprinter’s start. Not nearly so agile, of course - this much armor had too much mass to perch on fingers and toes. But it brought the torso unit’s thrusters into line with the horizontal thrust axis, and that was the important thing if she wanted to manage a take-off through the slow up-curve of the exit ramp.  
  
“JARVIS, take a note: I need not to be flying out through my driveway anymore. Thrusters to twenty percent on my mark. Ignition.”  
  
“Yes, Ms. Stark.” The low growling thunder of her thrusters’ backwash was drowned out by the audio baffling in the helmet, cleared to make room for JARVIS’s crisp reply, and she dropped her right hand six centimeters precisely for the necessary arc to hurl herself up and out over the water of the Pacific at just over six hundred miles an hour. Then she folded her hands against her sides, tilted her head back and burned up in a pure vertical climb just shy of hard enough to break the sound barrier - at least, not until she’d blazed through fifteen thousand feet and was out over the water where the sound of the sonic boom was lost to all ears. Then she was free to ramp it up past four thousand miles an hour - a strain on the thrusters, but well within the power load on the new reactor. A bit shy of two hours of flight time in silence ahead of her, and then the screaming and the death would start again.  
  
“JARVIS, load Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony and pull up everything we can get off the DoD’s servers on Gulmira. If we’ve got real-time satellite images off any Stark orbiters, I want that too.” The soft, serene hardness of her own voice should have startled her. Didn’t. Her breath was coming deep and steady now, and she watched the moon climbing back across the sky while documents and images blossomed across her HUD. The physicist in her reminded her she was outpacing the night, rushing back across the hours toward daylight, and the delicate phosphor thrill of it dulled the edge of cold anger that was sharp against her heart.  
  
She put wonder and memory both out of her mind and committed herself to the mission. _Victory is in the preparation,_ the maxim her father had been fond of went, and she would need a superior plan to go with her superior tech.  
  
By the time she’d evaded the Chinese radar net and cut across northern Mongolia, she was ready.  
  
Gulmira lay in the base of a valley, deep enough to rim the narrow, fast-flowing river perpetually cutting itself deeper and deeper into the old rock of the mountains. It was important for nothing but accessible by several of the battered excuses for roads in this country, a perfect meeting place for the ugly sort of business nobody wanted to talk about and to take a few more hostages like Yinsen. How a couple of reporters had wandered into the middle of it, God only knew, because it was about as bad a place for film as anything else. Anything except retribution.  
  
JARVIS’s voice hummed in her ear. “Targets are intermixed with hostages, Ms. Stark. Recommend against long-range engagement.”  
  
“Then we get down and dirty. Map thrust-cut, deceleration and landing to.... this point.” She flicked her eyes, using the optical sensors to pick out a position right in the thick of the IR signatures - targets, hostages, women and children being herded onto trucks. “Start mapping weapons with the optical scanners.”  
  
“Affirmative, Ms. Stark.” The ground was coming up fast now, dots of motion resolving into the shapes of men and trucks and weapons crates, and she reflexively braced her body for the impact as the crash stop threw everyone within a dozen feet back a step - distributed kinetic energy was a bitch, no matter how weak a medium air and soil might be. JARVIS had already been mapping targets and picking out weapons for twenty-five seconds, which was more than enough for her to make her first move. The man being hauled back toward the firing squad hit the dirt in shock as the target doing the hauling went down, ribs shattered by an impact equivalent to the kinetic energy of a small sedan at seventy-five miles an hour, and then she was on to the next target - a flick of her wrist engaged the repulsor array in her right hand, and she put a shot at fifteen percent power into the man who was trying to lay a rifle burst into her. He went down, a limp bag of broken bones, and she hit two more targets with repulsor blasts before she ran out of clear shots.  
  
Now she had targets pointing guns at hostages - women, mostly, battered and terrified. Her blood heated with rage, but she lowered her hands slowly and deliberately. Flexed her fingers with equally deliberate calm, loading the targeting software for the kinetic precision anti-personnel system. “JARVIS, how’s the target mapping? We sure on who’s who?”  
  
“98%, Ms. Stark.”  
  
 _Not good enough, but no choice._ She flexed her fingers again, and the inner armor across her shoulders vibrated with the launch of two dozen tiny, magnetically accelerated darts lined up with the hindbrains of their targets. Nine targets, nine kills.  
  
“Speakers,” she murmured, then raised her voice. “Protect yourselves and your families. Go.” Another twitch of her hand killed the external audio. “JARVIS, map all confirmed targets and weapons dumps. Run the chart onto the HUD.”  
  
“There are two large heat signatures moving in this direction, Ms. Stark. Most likely armored vehicles of some kind.” JARVIS wasn’t built to sound nervous, which was a relief at moments like this. He settled for chiding instead. “Are you sure it’s wise to remain in the area?”  
  
“We don’t leave until it’s finished, JARVIS. Ten percent thrust.” The suit hummed, power routing into the turbines in her boots, and then she was up over the rooftops and shot angles opened up beautifully. It was a little like being God dispensing the thunderbolts - every flick of her hand blew a man with a gun off his feet or shredded a case of her old gear into glittering fragments. “Micro-mortar munitions on every weapons dump that doesn’t show anything but targets within the burst radius.”  
  
“Affirmative, Ms. Stark.” The mortars mounted across her upper back thundered distantly, distributing high explosives in fragmentation cases across a half-mile radius. A half-dozen hotspots worth of weapons went up, throwing fire into the sky, and she zeroed in on the last two clusters - guarded, definitely, hostages in the area, possibly.  
  
The IR map updated, and she felt her lips pull back across her teeth in a predator’s smile. _Running. Smart. Some of you might live._ “Hit the other two, JARVIS, they ought to be clear now.”    
  
The impact of the HE shell hit like a freight train, driving her back ten feet and throwing her attitude thrusters off. They tried to compensate, failed, cut out and dropped her hard to the deck. She hit the ground like a quarter ton of hard metal, scraping paint and ablative plating as she went, and came up on one knee to see the two IFVs further up the river valley lining up their shots. “Activate HEAT rockets, two targets. Lock and fire.”  
  
The armor on her right arm segmented, baring the launch rails for the rockets, and the video display on her HUD flickered dark for a fraction of a second as the rocket motors burned across her vision. They flashed solid hits on her HUD, and she turned away a few seconds before they flared on the IR maps like two beacons of fire. “JARVIS, finish those mortar fire missions and scan for free targets.” Two more clusters of weapons crates disintegrated in impossible violent blossoms of flame, darkening the sky with smoke, and she gave her HUD one more glance. No confirmed targets - possible hostiles and possible locals both fleeing the village, vanishing into the hills on foot.  
  
“No clear targets, Ms. Stark. I project this engagement is now terminated. Follow-up would be counterproductive.”  
  
She closed her eyes and listened to the hammer of her own heart for a long minute. Breathed. Drove a dark cave in the mountains not so far from here out of her mind. “Plot a run back to Cali, JARVIS - low and fast.”  
  
“Affirmative, Ms. Stark.” The course flashed up in front of her, a sequence of rings hovering in mid air, and she lit her thrusters again.  
  
The sky and the dull pale earth of Afghanistan flashed out around her, and she gave herself to the flight.


	4. Chapter 4

The Pentagon had, once upon a time, been Antonia Stark’s favorite place on Earth outside a good lab. Uniforms, information from all over the world, the best information tech the military could afford to shell out for and all her best customers in one place - it was like being a kid in a candy store, except she was the one with the candy.   
  
She’d never quite gotten that metaphor to work right, and she’d never quite figured out when the place had lost its shine. Before her enforced ‘vacation,’ she’d have put her money on the fact that she was just getting old.   
  
Now she was wondering if this was what most people felt after a bad relationship.  _How did I ever love you in the first place?_ That kind of shit.   
  
Of course, the bruise across her ribs from where an AIM-120E AMRAAM with a proprietary Starktech seeker head fired off an F-22 had tried to put a hole in her suit over Afghanistan might be contributing to her sense of disillusionment. That and a lack of coffee.   
  
Somewhere between security and her assigned waiting area, Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes materialized from a side corridor to fall in step with her. Face grimly expressionless and spine ramrod straight, his voice as hard as Massachusetts soil before the thaw. “Ms. Stark. May I have a word?”     
  
“Always, LtC.” Toni kept her voice light and calm, her hands loose in the pockets of her bespoke suit. “You gonna ask me to silence my cell phone before the show starts, offer me some concessions?”   
  
The barest hint of a frown made the officer’s face even more foreboding. He gave the security escort she’d picked up at the door that particular sort of friendly smile reserved for issuing storm warnings. “I’ll take her from here, Lieutenant. Security business, OPSEC - I need to take Ms. Stark out behind the woodshed about our latest hangar queen, and it’s over your pay grade. I’ll make sure she makes her meeting on time.” The Lieutenant hesitated, visibly conflicted - it was a ‘suggestion’ from a superior officer, but it was also a violation of building policy. Rhodey caught the pause and fielded it. “Trust me, Lieutenant, if it was an option right now I’d be going evasive myself.”   
  
“Aye, sir.” Now there was a crooked grin on the Lieutenant’s face. Everybody knew LtC Rhodes was a good guy - the kind who’d get you out of being in the room when some brass primed to rip heads off came charging through. “I owe you a cold one.”   
  
“He likes Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier if you can get it,” Toni put in dryly, “but that’s just because he’s a fruity kind of guy.”   
  
The Lieutenant threw a look at Rhodes that said  _Fucking civilian primadonnas_ loud enough to be heard all over the building, then cleared off. Rhodes promptly went back to not-so-subtly glaring at Toni.   
  
“Smooth extraction, Rhodey. We making a quick stop in the file room for fun and games? ‘Cause I didn’t bring my handcuffs.” It was a crude joke - the wrong joke - but Toni’s nerves were starting to twitch and humor was better than looking guilty.   
  
She had a lot of practice avoiding that when it came to Jim Rhodes.   
  
“Toni.” He spoke in the barest murmur, loud enough only to carry to her ears. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’m pretty sure you’re involved.” They came to another hallway junction, Rhodes nodding crisply to a passing aide. “After our long acquaintance I expect a certain amount of crazy from you, but sending private tech into a warzone is really raising the bar.”   
  
Toni pitched her voice down as well, doing her best to look casual - even flirty. Her best was pretty good. “You know, I’m pretty sure that would be... oh, I don’t know, illegal? Stupid? Possibly fattening?”   
  
Rhodey shot her a sideways glare with an eyebrow raise thrown in. “None of those have ever stopped you before. They should really have an official designation for ‘obnoxious dumbass’. Should go somewhere between ‘asset’ and ‘enemy combatant’.” If he’d been out of uniform, Toni was pretty sure, he’d have either been drinking or rubbing his temples in frustration.    
  
Toni stopped at an intersection, turned into him, put her hand on his shoulder and dropped her voice to a murmur even he could barely hear. “Rhodey, stop. Just stop. What you want me to tell you... if you’re wrong, there’s nothing I can say that’ll convince you I’ve got nothing to do with whatever it is. If you’re right and I tell you, then you’re fucked - you get that? Because you either gotta get somebody to arrest me, right now, or you’re part of something that could cost you your bird and the star after that. Nothing good comes out of this for you, you get that?”   
  
The Lieutenant Colonel stood his ground, staring down at the technologist with all the emotion of a Sphinx. “It hasn’t slipped my mind for a second. If you  _are_ involved in this shit, stop. Please.” A subtle note of pleading entered his voice, and his glare softened. “I’m telling you this as your friend. You have to stop, Toni, and I know how much you hate being told what to do, but I’m willing to piss you off if it keeps you out of a federal prison.”    
  
“Rhodey,” Toni whispered as she leaned up on her toes to kiss his cheek, “you’re a good friend. But believe me when I tell you that I’m not running any risks I don’t have to run. That I have any choice about running. Believe me?”   
  
Rhodes closed his eyes, let out a very quiet sigh of resignation, and reached up to clap Toni on the shoulder. “Okay, I believe you.” Turning back towards the debriefing room, he cracked a small smile. “You realize you owe me a drink or two for all the stress I’m suffering on your behalf.”   
  
“Come out to the house in Malibu,” she answered, falling in next to him. “I’ll show you what tomorrow looks like, and drinks are on the house.”   
  
They went through the door into the conference room, Toni taking the single spot at the table nearest the door and Rhodey circling around to the lead investigator’s place at the middle of the half-ring table, and the woman to his right - a two-star Navy Admiral with neatly-trimmed gold hair and distinctly unfriendly eyes - unofficially opened the proceedings with a tap of her fingers against the metal of the table. “Now that we’re all here, Colonel Rhodes, perhaps you can begin?”   
  
Rhodey took a sip of his water, opened his notes and visibly composed himself.  _ Softball , _ Toni read in his face, and resisted the urge to swear under her breath. That man was never going to learn to cover his own ass when it came to her.   
  
Well, she’d just have to give him a little cover fire of her own. “If we’re going to wait for the Colonel, can I get a drink and a recliner? Maybe a lap dance? I was up late last night with girl trouble - well, girl and boy trouble - and I could really use the nap.”   
  
Predictably, Admiral Goldilocks resorted to officious glaring. “As the subject of this debriefing, Ms. Stark, you will conduct yourself in a fashion befitting the seriousness of the occasion.”   
  
“So... that’s a no on the recliner and the lap dance, then?”   
  
The look on Rhodey’s face said everything about just how many drinks would be involved in Toni’s apology. Toni resisted the urge to grin - no sense giving Goldilocks mixed signals yet. She could work that in once they got to the abduction.  _Maybe I ought to invest in a distillery._


	5. Chapter 5

_I wonder if I can get frequent flier miles on the Aegis. Between that and what I’ve been clocking on the company jet in the last twenty-four, I’ve gotta be able to get free tickets to somewhere impressive. Mars, maybe._ Toni let the rumble of the heavy Lincoln on L.A. highway wash the strain of her five hour Pentagon debrief out of her neck and shoulders, the glass of whiskey she’d poured herself as soon as Happy had the door closed still half-filled in her hand. It wasn’t the longest day she’d pulled in her life, but she was pretty sure she’d never been slapped, shot at and threatened with obstruction charges in the same day before. She’d have to have Pepper check on that.

She knew for a fact that she hadn’t ever had to do all of those things and then share a chilly plane ride back to L.A. with the man who was both her best friend and the second biggest threat to the security of her life. It would technically have been perfectly legit for her to blow off Rhodey’s request for a ride out to Edwards AFB, but after the shit he’d taken both for and from her over the last few weeks she hadn’t had the chutzpah - possibly another personal first.   
  
They hadn’t said more than seven words to each other on the whole flight. Pissed, guilty and not giving a fuck were all still on her list of options, but she hadn’t managed to get past the ‘all of the above’ stage yet.  
  
Trying to run the math on L.A. local time in her head to spare opening her eyes made a decent distraction, but she got tangled up somewhere around the second time she’d blown across the international date line. Gave up and checked. _Five in the afternoon._   
  
She pressed the switch for the intercom. “Happy, scrap the trip home. I need to stop in the office.”

Happy wasn’t the type to swear, but it was amazing how long-suffering he could make “Yes, Ms. Stark” sound. Someday she’d have to find out how he did that.  
  
The updated reactor in her chest was holding up. Actually, it was bleeding enough peripheral power into her system that she’d only needed her coffee to keep the physical symptoms of addiction under control - thirty hours into her day, she felt as fresh as she ought to have felt after ten. _Fringe benefits of being a walking high-energy storage system your doctor never warned you about._   
  
The suits were starting to migrate out of the office about the time Happy pulled up near the front of the complex - off to play a little golf or maybe polish their resumes in hopes of jumping the Titanic before the iceberg finished doing it in. The techies were still in, though - she could tell that by the harried way the secretaries barely glanced at her when she came through the door. It was almost five, and that meant it was almost pizza time.  
  
She remembered the watch the staff had sent her when she declared that policy and smiled to hold back a wave of tears she couldn’t afford - she’d been wearing that watch in Afghanistan, and it hadn’t made it back. She missed it. Tangible reminders that she was still an engineer and not a suit were too precious not to hoard.  
  
Her office would probably be empty and she wouldn’t have to worry about the security team watching her have a little breakdown. That made it infinitely more attractive than the elevator, and that made keeping a smile on all the way to the big double doors easier than the rest of the day had been.  
  
 _Not empty_ was her first thought on the way through the door. _I should have had another whiskey in the car_ was her second.  
  
Pepper Potts was sitting at her boss’ desk with impeccable posture, typing away at the sleek terminal, and paused only long enough to see who had entered the office before turning back to her work. Toni didn’t miss the way Pepper’s throat tightened with a reflexive swallow, or how the keyboard clacked loudly under the sudden excessive force of her assistant’s fingers.  
  
Toni went straight for the bottle and glasses by her set of trophies, because her lack of a drink was the simplest problem available she could fix. “Did the press put you up for canonization after I left, or just settle for giving you a medal?”  
  
She was beginning to be worried about the terminal’s screen. As far as she knew Pepper had never glared holes in anything, but she looked like she was trying hard enough to make it a real possibility. A long moment of full-contact keyboarding drew out the tension in the room before it broke, Pepper turning abruptly to give Toni the full force of her anger.  
  
“Mostly they made sympathetic noises and cast me as the long-suffering good girl who’s either too stupid, too much of a pushover or too damn crazy to find a boss who doesn’t harass her.”  Rapping her fingers on the gleaming surface of the desk at a truly impressive speed, her other hand tightened around the armrest. “It was a better PR scene than I could have planned, but I have to wonder which it is.” Turning back to the terminal, she reached for the mouse again. “The most popular one seems to be insanity. Even half of my colleagues have suggested that I get therapy.”  
  
“I hear that’s good for the psyche. Maybe we can share a therapist.” Toni knocked back her glass, letting the burn of the alcohol in her throat clear some of the anger from her voice, and poured another before she walked across the room to drop an SD card on the desk. “We have homework to do first.”  
  
“Don’t you dare.” Standing, Pepper was taller than Toni. She stared down at her boss, shaking. “Don’t you dare act like this is just business. I’ve been up all night, checking every damn newsfeed I could find about Afghanistan and doing shooters of Pepto Bismol.” Her scowl wavered, unshed tears clinging to her lashes. “You don’t get to pretend everything’s all right with me.”  
  
Toni didn’t try to break eye contact. She didn’t make a joke. She didn’t back up.   
  
_Evade and deny_ was what she was good at. What she’d always been good at. But she’d been good at building weapons, too, good at playing the Pentagon game, good at not looking at the blood on her hands. She’d been good at a lot of things before the cold dry hell in the desert that had left her with nightmares and open eyes.  
  
She remembered Yinsen’s hands on her shoulders, risking his life by touching her so he could be sure she understood. _Did you see that? Those are your weapons in the hands of those murderers! Is this what you want? Is this what you wish the legacy of the great Antonia Stark to be?_   
  
_I shouldn't do anything. They could kill you, Yinsen, and they're gonna kill me or worse no matter what I do. Even if they don't, I’ve got a chest full of metal and a mag-bubble running on a car battery. I'll probably be dead in a week._ She’d been so tired, so angry and so full of despair that she’d just wanted to lay down and die, and he’d just smiled that world-weary, gentle smile of his that saw everything and still gave a damn.  
  
 _Then this is a very important week for you, isn't it?_   
  
She put the drink down on the table, reached down to wrap her hands around Pepper’s wrists and kept her eyes open.   
  
“What I did to you on the dance floor was cruel and it was probably wrong. It was the best thing I could think of.” She saw Pepper’s jaw tighten, saw the answer start in her throat and kept going anyway. “I broke laws, I put my life in danger, I put everything we’re working for in danger because I can’t wash my hands of what I did. Of what I made you help me do. I put those tools out there and I believed the bastards who told me that only the good guys would get them, and I was wrong. I was just wrong, Pepper. Those weapons are a living monster that I put out in the world, and I’ve got to fight it because I don’t know how else to look myself in the mirror. If you... if you don’t want to be a part of that, that’s fine. That’s all right. I will set you up with any recommendation you want, any division of the company you want, I will go on C-SPAN and say you shot me down the first time I got out of line because I owe you all of that and more, but before any of that I need to find out who’s leaking our gear to thugs like the ones I was trading shots with last night because they had _shipping containers_ full of our weapons that came off the line in the last three months. Brand fucking new, Pepper. Somebody in our house is dealing our gear under the table and that... I did that. I made that possible and I got your hands just as dirty as I got mine so I am asking you - please - that whatever else you decide, you help me find these bastards and put them out of business before anyone else dies from our work. From my work. Please.”  
  
Pepper pulled her arms back, Toni’s hands sliding down her wrists until they were clasping her own. A dozen emotions tugged at her face from all sides, and she took a step forward and  lowered her head to rest on Toni’s shoulder. Her tears were soaking into the jacket, thick enough to make it damp and rough against her cheek, and neither she nor Toni seemed to care.  
  
Their fingers untangled and Toni’s arms slid around Pepper, tightened against her enough to feel tremors run through her assistant’s body and slowly fade as the tension released from Pepper’s shoulders. Toni could feel the taller woman’s heat, smell her subtly spicy perfume, watch the afternoon sun light up her hair like fire. When Pepper started shaking again, Toni clutched her all the tighter until she realized her assistant was laughing.  
  
“We seem to have failed spectacularly at maintaining professional boundaries.” Toni could feel Pepper grinning into her shoulder. “Not really surprising in your case, I guess.”  
  
“I’m surprised,” Toni murmured into the hair of the only woman in the world she’d ever actually managed to trust. “Believe me, I’m surprised.”  
  
Pulling back, Pepper smiled at Toni while she wiped a streak of tears from her face. “One for the record books.” The arm still wrapped around the inventor hugged a little tighter, and the taller woman leaned in close, paused, and then pressed her lips softly to Toni’s cheek. She stepped back out of the embrace with one last squeeze of her fingers and sat down again.  
  
“So. Homework.”  
  
“Right.” Toni’s skin was humming like an overclocked processor, but she put her mind back on track with a particularly emphatic snap. _Think about how terrified you are of what just happened later. Work now._ “I took footage while I was in the field. Serial numbers, make stamps. Remember how we tweaked the Stark Industries logo for each major manufacturing center to make it recognizable under microscope - no more product coming from nowhere? The optics on the Aegis are good, Pepper. Really good. You can ID the source factory on even the gear I didn’t get serial shots on. So we take the numbers and run them back, see where our missing gear came off the lines, then track them forward and see who’s supposed to have them or where they got ‘lost.’ Sweep the whole system, top to bottom - ghost drives and all. Assume security’s been compromised, so we do it from outside - a full-scale hack job. I wrote the program on my flight back to the States - I just need someone who knows the company inside and out to make it work.”  
  
Pepper raised an eyebrow, then reached for the SD card. “I’m building quite the skill set on your clock, Ms. Stark. I’m not sure if I should expect calls from headhunters or the FBI.”  
  
“If we do this right, Miss Potts, I’m fairly certain you can expect both.” Toni’s smile was all teeth now, and the look in her eyes was a match for the gold-titanium optic slits on the Aegis helmet. “Possibly including literal headhunters. Let’s find our leak.”


	6. Chapter 6

The program on the SD card cracked into the Stark Industries intranet with a series of almost cheerful beeps, as if it were happy to do its job. Pepper watched the program sift through terabytes of data and tried to ignore the fact that her boss was standing with her hand on the back of the chair, close enough to watch the screen over the assistant’s shoulder.  
  
Close enough for Pepper to feel her body heat.   
  
She pressed her lips together, still able to feel Toni’s skin on them. It had been much gentler than the hard crush of mouths on the dance floor, more affectionate, and more importantly on Pepper’s initiative, so it was that kiss that distressed her more. _Getting involved with Antonia Stark is a terrible idea._ Another set of files unzipped itself under the influence of Toni’s program. _You know that. You know all the **myriad** reasons why. _  
  
She tried very, very hard to put it out of her mind. They had a lot of data to sift, even with the sorting program on the SD card to clear out the truly irrelevant for them, and she was going to need her concentration for that. Concentration that was not going to be easy with Toni breathing down the back of her neck.  
  
If she had any sense, she’d tell Toni to go get another chair. Or another terminal. Or sit down.   
  
Toni’s fingers traced the line of her collarbone, and she didn’t do any of those things.  
  
“Not helping, boss,” she did manage after the first thirty minutes.  
  
“Mmm,” Toni had replied eloquently. “Switch to the outbound manifests from Stark International and let’s cross-check the buyers again.”  
  
“Toni.” Pepper tried to make her voice sound very patient. “If I can’t concentrate, I might miss something, so please stop feeling me up. Ma’am.”  
  
“Fine. Right.” Toni’s hand relocated itself to the back of the chair again. “Problem solved.”  
  
Pepper sighed and went back to the data because it was marginally less frustrating and incomprehensible than her boss/possible lover.   
  
She was midway through the books of the fifth shell company they’d identified when a pop-up message blinked on the screen. _Ghost drive found._   
  
Blueprints for some old weapons cluttered the screen, then folded back into their file. Nothing unusual so far. The leather of the chair creaked subtly as Toni’s weight lifted from it, the woman herself stepping back to look out the huge windows at the gathering dark and then cut across the room to get coffee. It was much less distracting. Pepper hated the way it felt like loss.  
  
 _You’re already involved. The only choice is how far you go._ A third set of blueprints whizzed by. When it finished, a fourth ghost file opened, and Pepper found herself typing fast to keep the windows open.  
  
Blueprints again, but it wasn’t the familiar Stark designs they’d been watching for the last few minutes. Pepper’s eyes widened as more and more pictures piled up and it became clear that someone, somehow, had gotten copies of the armor’s schematics. Something in her breathing or the sharp sound of the chair when she straightened must have drawn Toni’s attention, because her boss set the coffee down fast enough to chime the expensive china and then swore softly and colorfully for almost a minute. “Those are my originals. Those are scans of my fucking originals from a fucking jigsaw puzzle of paper. I burned that place to the ground, I killed all those people - who the hell would know to go back there and sift the ashes for disconnected bits of paper?”  
  
Pepper left the blueprint windows open, the program continuing its sifting. “The scans are datastamped internal... but not a Stark field office. A security team - one of the ones that you ordered shut down when you got back. That was shut down, according to the database, but that’s still uploading things through their communications systems.”  
  
“But how would one of our teams even know where to look? I didn’t tell anyone that location, I didn’t even go through official company channels when I hired a salvage team to go back and get the suit from....” Toni’s eyes widened. “Shit, shit, shit. Move. Shit.”  
  
Pepper started to shift to the side a few seconds before Toni bumped the arm of the chair hard with a sharp hip, giving her enough extra momentum to rattle the desk slightly when she - chair and all - bounced off it. Her boss barely noticed, fingers flying over the keyboard, and a separate window of raw code and command prompts flashed by and then resolved itself into a thoroughly uninformative and probably not strictly official shipping manifest mapped over by an access log - internal, Stark International.   
  
“Shit,” Toni breathed again under her breath, then grabbed for her coat. “That’s the salvage manifest from the little fly-by-night I got to bring Aegis 1.0 back from the desert. Whoever these fuckers are, they know it’s in the garage. They shifted the evidence on it from active to archives _today._ ”  
  
Pepper froze, her mouth hanging open. “Oh God.” Toni making for the door snapped her out of it, and she was on her feet and blocking the exit in half a second. “Do you have the other Aegis? Please tell me you’re not going up against a whole security team in your business suit.”  
  
“Considering that I was flying it around Afghanistan getting shot at by the locals and the USAF, keeping it around the house didn’t seem like a good idea.” Toni’s grin was a shadow of its usual self, but it was still there. “The original and a couple of low-weight prototypes are there - more than enough to reconstruct the full Aegis - but if they were hoping for the field model they’re going to be disappointed.” Her arms went around Pepper in a fierce embrace, and then she bodily shifted the taller woman out of her way and let her go with a last squeeze. “I need you here, Pepper - I need to know who these people are, I need to know their plan. The system’s wide open now; anything we’ve got, you can find. You figure out what’s going on, you call me. I’ve got to go. I might still be able to beat them to the punch.”  
  
“Keep your phone on.” Pepper stood with a hand on the door watching Toni jog towards the stairs and kept standing there even after her boss had disappeared from view. “You’re not going to stop running off like this, are you.”    
  
Drawing in a breath, she stood, closed and locked the door behind her, and went back to the desk. The Aegis blueprints and shipping manifest were still there, but a number of files had opened and closed while she’d been seeing Toni off. Typing into the command prompt, she brought up the files she’d missed.   
  
Nothing. She sighed, closing them, and did her best not to sublimate her stress into acid reflux again.  
  
Could she keep doing this? Run base support for her brilliant, insane employer? Sit by while Toni risked her life, again and again? She could leave. Get another job. Try dating again. Live a relatively sane, safe life.  
  
Clicking through a series of dialog boxes, she snorted. She could barely imagine herself with another job, let alone imagine liking it.  
  
And she knew that if she did, it wouldn’t stop her from worrying about Toni. At least this way she was helping the genius stay in one piece and right past wrongs.   
  
“You’re right, boss lady,” she murmured. “We’re both responsible.”   
  
Frowning, Pepper recognized another datastamp from the rogue security team. This was a series of field reports, all from Afghanistan. She muttered as she read. “Went here, looked there, yaddah yaddah, talked to villagers a, b, and c....Oh. Oh my god.”  Covering her mouth with one hand, she read the message again in horror, hoping she’d read it wrong.  
  
She hadn’t.  
  
Digging her phone out of her purse, she started copying the files to the SD card. Toni’s number played the first few chords of the usual hard rock song.  
  
“Stark,” her boss’s voice came through - automatic answer, reflex and work. In the background, the speaker failed to drown out the scream of tires in a high-speed power slide. “Pepper, I’ve been on with JARVIS - nothing from the house, no datalinks, nada. The whole system must have gone into hard lockdown. Best case, that means they’re inside looting the goods. Worst case, they’ve come and gone. I’m enroute to my gear. What’ve you got?”  
  
Pepper’s voice was a half-octave higher than usual despite her efforts to stay calm. She’d never been able to compartmentalize her emotions the way her boss did. Most of the time she was glad. “Toni. The strike on your convoy. It wasn’t random, it wasn’t political. It was a hit.” She swallowed dryly and her next words had a slight rasp.   
  
“It’s all Stane. He paid them to kill you, Toni.”  
  
“Over fifty percent of murder victims are killed by people they know. _Qui bono._ I’m a fucking idiot, Pepper - I just didn’t think he’d take it that far.” She could hear the hard rush of Toni’s breathing. “Okay. Okay. We work the problem. I’m rerouting - if it’s Stane running this, I know where they’re taking the gear. No point going home to find they’ve already cleared it out. I’ll try to get ahead of the curve, intercept. Keep working the data - it’s not what we know, it’s what we can prove. Find what we need to drop the whole world on his head, Pepper.”   
  
Finally she could get her mouth working again. “Done. Where should I send the cavalry?” Already her hands were dancing back and forth, copying gigabytes of data, tagging the pieces most likely to be ‘probable cause.’ She paused only to look up the number for the local office of the FBI.  
  
“High security, massive power needs, on-site computers … where else? Send them to the arc reactor - probably buried under it.” Toni let out another breath - long and slow, this time, in spite of the scream of her sports car’s engine and tires as she tore up the road. “Pepper... whatever happens with this, I just want you to know that it’s always been you. The only person I could ever trust with the company, with my work, with everything - you’re all I’ve got. Just thought you should know.”  
  
The words felt almost tangible as they struck Pepper, her chest tightening around them. “Don’t say that like you’ll never have another chance. You are not going up against this alone and you are damn well coming back from it.” Holding back tears for the second time in twenty minutes, she bit her lip, fist clenched around the phone. “I need you too, you lunatic.”   
  
“Dinner. Anywhere you want, as soon as this is over. On me.” Toni’s voice might have hitched, just a little. Just enough. “Gotta run. Good luck, Miss Potts.”  
  
The phone cut off with a soft, mournful beep.  
  
Pepper cursed softly. “Stay safe, Ms. Stark.”  
  
As she waited for the FBI to pick up, she massaged the bridge of her nose. Maybe the press was right. Either she was already crazy for choosing Toni, or the genius billionaire would drive her completely insane within a month or two.  
  
Well, maybe not. She knew a good therapist.


	7. Chapter 7

The ride in Toni’s jet had been strained, though once he’d brought out a briefing folder and his iPod, he’d been able to ignore her in peace. Mostly. Every now and then something particularly infuriating that she’d said during the briefing would surface in his memory and then he’d grind his teeth for a minute or two before promising himself that he’d take a drink with or have a good yell at Toni for each incidence. Maybe both. That could be cathartic.   
  
He made the requisite appearance for the brass at Edwards, a friendly check in with the mechanical staff, and then he was driving towards the coast in a government car.    
  
By the time he’d made it out to Malibu, the sun was low in the sky and gloriously painting the smog that covered more than just LA. The view and the long, solitary drive had managed to lift Rhodey’s mood a bit and he was even considering letting one or two of Toni’s goads go.   
  
He managed to get all the way up to the front doors of her house before he realized something was wrong. The damage to the outside of the front door was subtle, a few deep scratches and a chunk torn out, and the way it sat slightly ajar struck him for all of thirty seconds as a typically Toni bit of carelessness.    
  
The first thing that actually set off his training was the half-lit darkness of the entry hall. The back of the house was lit up brilliantly - he’d seen that on the drive in - but only the blue of the emergency light panels illuminated the curved section of hall he walked into.    
  
Glass crunched under his foot, and when he turned to look he caught something out of the corner of his eye and finished the turn to see the blasted ruin of the security doors - metal blown apart at the central lock point. Before the sight had even fully registered, he was reaching for the sidearm he wasn’t carrying.    
  
Mentally cursing, he crouched low behind a nearby half-wall, listening hard.    
  
Silence.    
  
He waited a full minute, heard nothing, and decided to take his chances. Toni could be - scratch that, probably  _ was _ \- in trouble and he was sure as hell not going to sit here all night and wait for the police to show up. The door to Toni’s garage was only a few meters away, blown open too, and his boots crunched on the glass again as he picked his way down into the sanctum sanctorum of Toni’s creative life.   
  
Screens that were never dark stood silently vacant, tool racks that were always immaculate and parts bins that were perpetually in use lay overturned on the floor, and the central work area’s dedicated storage vault gaped open like a torn-out socket. The floor was torn up near the cars, too - metal plasma-cut into chunks and thrown aside, concrete blown into powder with explosives or sonics.  The place looked like a ruin or a tomb.   
  
There were no bodies.   
  
That was good news, though he didn’t let himself sigh in relief until he’d systematically searched the whole house. When no bodies or other evidence of assault, murder or kidnap presented themselves, he felt a wave of relief so profound that he had to collapse on the leather sofa in the living room. Hands over both eyes, head resting on the back of the couch, he took a few minutes just to breathe.   
  
Sighing, he took his phone out.  _Hope this works. I swear, Toni, if you’re doing something stupid like a burglary simulation I swear I will strangle you with your own extension cords._   
  
Her number rang once, twice, three times. Rhodey was starting to get nervous again. He hung up and did something he’d told himself several times he’d never do - not least because it was a bad precedent.    
  
He dialed the emergency code for her phone she’d given him back when they were bunking together more nights than not and hoped to God it still worked.    
  
“Stark.” The relief in his chest when he heard her voice in his ear was so huge that for a full thirty seconds he couldn’t speak. Ten of those, he got to endure in silence. Then she started in on him. “Rhodey, I swear to God that if this is you calling to bitch at me about the Pentagon thing I am going to personally rewire your credit card to make every register you use it at play ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ until the cashier’s ears bleed!”   
  
“Toni. Thank God you’re all right.” He was worried he might start laughing. “I’m at your house. There’s been a break-in.”   
  
There was a full minute of silence, which might have been a record for them.    
  
“Rhodey,” she said softly into his ear in a voice that was so tight with concern that it twisted his guts into a knot to hear it, “what’s the word of the day?”   
  
“The word of the day is aerothermodynamics,” he answered reflexively, too started to be as concerned as the old safeword probably should have made him. “I’m fine, I’m alone. Most of your house is fine, too. They gutted the garage and left.”   
  
“Okay. Yeah. That’s about what I thought.” She went silent again for a few seconds, and in the background he caught the growl of a high-power car engine - probably her Reventon doing at least thirty over the limit. “Rhodey, I can’t tell you what’s going on - I don’t have time. Pepper will fill you in. Call her and tell her the word is Aegis. Before that, though, I need you to do something else for me. It’s important and I can’t trust anybody else and you can’t ask me why. Okay?”   
  
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Rhodey sighed. “Yeah, okay. You now owe me a case of German beer.”   
  
“Rhodey,” she told him, her voice tight with emotion, “for what I owe you there isn’t going to be enough beer in the world. If I get out of this one piece, you’re coming all the way in if that’s what you want.” Half a breath - not long enough for him to get a word in, long enough to heard her brain shifting gears. “Is JARVIS’s voice interface still up? He should recognize your voiceprint.”   
  
“Let’s see. JARVIS?”   
  
A speaker near the piano crackled and hummed, then spoke in a stilted parody of JARVIS’s usual voice. “Hello, Colonel Rhodes. This database is experiencing significant data corruption. Efforts were made to force-crack the encryption directly on the hardware.”   
  
“They would have, the bastards.” Toni sounded angry now - blisteringly, searingly angry, like the sound of her creation so badly hurt was as ugly as hearing her own child crying. Hell, to her, it probably was. Rhodey might have tried to comfort her, but she ran right over him. “I need you to tell JARVIS the following - it has to be a live voice, calm and clear, so take your time. Your birthdate, the last five of your social, Flyboy, then repeat Szilard Cassandra Xenophon three times. Have you got that?”   
  
Fumbling at a side table for a pen, Rhodey grabbed a random receipt from his wallet, phone clutched between ear and shoulder. “Got the first part. Say that weird incantation again?”   
  
“Szilard Cassandra Xenophon.”   
  
He had no idea if he was spelling any of it right, but when he repeated it back to Toni she was satisfied with the pronunciation. He nodded once to himself, then sighed again. “I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you to be careful with whatever crazy-ass shit you’re planning right now.”   
  
She laughed, soft and raw, and he heard the tires on her car scream against the road. “Careful as I can be, Rhodey. One more thing - you’re probably going to want to call your bosses when you get off the phone with me. Tell them about my houseguests. Tell them you called me and I was uncooperative. That shouldn’t be hard for them to believe.”   
  
The Lieutenant Colonel snorted. “If I told them the truth they’d give me another psych eval.”   
  
“True, that. Take care of yourself, Rhodey. I mean that. If this goes sideways, don’t cover for me. Just watch out for yourself and Pepper. Got it?”   
  
Eyes wandering around the darkened living room, Rhodey tapped the pen on his knee. He let out a breath, then finally spoke.   
  
“Yeah, I got it.”   
  
“Good.” She let out a long breath, the growl of the engine slackening for a few seconds, and he found himself remembering the night she’d rolled out of bed with him for some water and just vanished into the air for six weeks, coming back with a major theoretical breakthrough in aerodynamics to go with her track marks, bruises, suspended charges for assaulting a police officer and behavioral probation from the dean of students. About that distant, unreadable look on her face he’d sworn at himself most of the length of those weeks for not knowing how to decode.    
  
How he still didn’t know what she’d been thinking.    
  
“I have to go, Rhodey.” Her voice was so quiet and so calm, he might almost have called it serene coming out of someone else. That wasn’t a word he’d ever thought of applying to Antonia Stark. “‘Though I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am at twenty thousand feet and climbing.’ Fly safe.”   
  
The phone clicked off in his hand, and she was gone.    
  
A minute later, the device’s screen went to sleep, and the absence of that little light felt much bigger than the few dozen lumens it emitted. “JARVIS, lights on.” Squinting in the suddent bright, Rhodey put his phone away, stared at the scribbled passcode, and shrugged. “Let’s do this. Maybe raid the liquor cabinet after. Definitely the fridge.”   
  
As he was giving Toni’s pet AI her sequence, Rhodey wondered if she had code names for everyone, and what they were. He made a bet with himself if she’d tell him if he asked.    
  
“Directive acknowledged, Colonel. Beginning purge. Good-bye for now.” JARVIS acknowledged the instruction with a peculiarly restrained formality, then went silent. For exactly ten seconds, every visual display Rhodey could see (including all of the windows) went white and flickering with a hail of signal noise, and then they all went dark at once.    
  
“JARVIS?”     
  
Everything was silent. Without the white-noise soundproofing, he was pretty sure he could hear the ocean lapping at the beach down below. Even with the building and all the furnishings intact, the house seemed like an empty shell.   
  
He dialed Edwards and then the local police. Once all of that was over with, he stood, spine cracking as he stretched, and then made his way to the kitchen to wait.   
  
There wasn’t much in the fridge except three-day old Pho, but the liquor cabinet was well-stocked and there was ice in the freezer. Typical Toni. He poured himself a drink in the silence and hoped to God he’d have a chance to give her shit about that later.


	8. Chapter 8

Obadiah Stane was not a happy man. Here he sat, locked out of the board of the company he’d been practically running for the last seventeen years because Howard’s daughter had decided to have a PTSD-fueled conscience attack, his lawsuits and PR campaigns going expensively nowhere, his lucrative sideline in arming the third world a thing of the past, his position as Chairman of the Board about as likely to last out the year as a Latin American ‘democracy.’ About the only good news on the horizon was that he still had a solid grip on the black part of the company’s budget, which had allowed him to get the specs on Toni’s latest wonder-tech and arrange the off-the-books acquisition that might - just possibly - get him back in the game. Assuming the idiots he’d been able to hire to work development in Sector 16 could actually make progress now that he’d handed them the fucking golden goose. They certainly hadn’t been able to do anything with the plans he’d so expensively dug out of the sand in Afghanistan.    
  
No, he was definitely not a happy man. But he hadn’t clawed his way to virtually controlling the Stark empire without learning to play dirty, and he wasn’t going to be counted out just yet.    
  
It would have been better if he’d gotten Toni’s whole stash, of course. Whatever little toy she’d taken over to Afghanistan to rip up the expendable thugs was still out there somewhere, bunkered down in some off-the-grid facility no doubt. That was all right, though. They had the original and bits of a few prototypes - enough to start thinking bigger. Better.    
  
Maybe he’d take the gear and start his own company. Stane Industries - that’d have the Pentagon salivating in no time. The board would come crawling back in a hurry, of course, but it wouldn’t hurt to be the man with the iron grip on the IP rights. He’d think about it.    
  
He was about to take a drink of mineral water when the alert button on his borrowed desk lit up - he’d kicked the section supervisor out so he’d have time to think - and he reached down to jab the flashing spot of red with a thick finger. “What?”   
  
“Security breach, sir. It’s a woman, alone - in the second level security trap. She says she’s here to speak to you, sir.”    
  
“To me?” He shot upright in the chair, jaw set. “Nobody’s fucking supposed to know I’m here at all, Franklin.”   
  
“She IDed you by name. You want me to...” Franklin’s voice trailed off, ticking up at the end slightly. He was a man who was very useful for his purpose, but he had the vices of his virtues.  _When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail._  It was Toni. It  _had_ to be Toni.    
  
Well, that changed things. “Bring her down here, under guard. Quietly.”   
  
“Yes, sir.”   
  
Leaning back in his chair, Obadiah brought both hands to his forehead and pulled them slowly over his skull, a gesture of stress that had outlived his hair. Maybe it had sped his balding--God knew he’d experienced enough strain in the last twenty years. So of course it was just before all those years of careful, secret work were about to pay off that Toni was going to destroy everything.   
  
No. Not this close. He wouldn’t let her. Whatever it took.   
  
The alert button was ready and waiting. Franklin knew where to get rid of incriminating evidence. This would all work out one way or another. He’d mourn the loss of Toni’s genius, of course, but you couldn’t build empires without sacrifices.   
  
“I love the new office, Obadiah. It’s very fitting. Mad Supervillian Chic.” Flanked by four armed guards and with a livid purple bruise on her right cheek, Antonia Stark still managed to sound like a woman on top of the world. She was wearing one of her suits, though the jacket was open and rumpled from where the guards had given her pockets a cursory search and the shirt was half-buttoned over a bulletproof vest he half-recognized (not that it was going to do her any good, but he couldn’t fault her for trying). Her hair was loose around her shoulders as if she had meant to put it up but not quite had the time. It was annoyingly attractive. “Nice little place you have down here. Does it have a dungeon? It doesn’t look like the kind of place that would be complete without a dungeon.”   
  
Stane raised an eyebrow. “Always joking around, aren’t you, Toni. I don’t suppose you’d get serious if I told you that there is no dungeon because I don’t take prisoners?”    
  
“No, probably not. I bet you just installed an incinerator down here if case you had to add any more bodies to the foundations.” Toni brushed past one of the guards with such breezy confidence that the man actually backed out of her way, walked over to the desk and sat herself down on the front of it a couple of feet from him just like she was twenty-one again and wandering into his office to talk about some damn fool idea or another. It made him feel old. “Did my father know how much of a bastard you were, or did you just mislay your conscience some time in the last couple of decades?”   
  
Stane tapped a pen once on the desktop, leveling a flatly annoyed look at Howard’s girl that failed to dent her. He tapped it again before speaking. “Your father was an idealist,” he drew out, hoping the phrasing would make her feel childlike. “The world wanted to let him be one, for a while. I didn’t have to take the company in a more practical direction until just before he died.”  He let that sink in, taking the pause to return the pen to its slot in the desk organizer. Toni kept the same expression of amused disdain on her face, but the subtle tension in her jawline told him he’d scored a hit.    
  
He smiled. “And here you are, going from a practical engineer to an idealist. Sort of the reverse of the company. It’s fitting, really. Joining your father in body and spirit.”   
  
“No foreplay, Obie?” Her lips twitched. something that might have been mistaken for a smile if you couldn’t see the mockery in her eyes. “Here I was, waiting for you to put a gun to my head and threaten me with getting thoroughly shot if I didn’t tell you how to get my suit working - you are having trouble getting it to boot up, aren’t you, even with the first generation reactor you salvaged out of my vaults? Didn’t figure you’d want to just tell me I was getting dead no matter what and give up that bargaining chip.”   
  
“Don’t think you’re special, Toni. It might take a while but others will figure out your toys.”  He took a sip from the bottle of Perrier. “Besides, I thought I’d offer to let Miss Potts live if you cooperated. Seemed more likely to work.”   
  
Score two. Her eyes changed - went flat and hard and unreadable in the way her father’s used to when he didn’t like the score. “You  _really_ want to leave her out of this, Obadiah.”   
  
“Or what? You’re not exactly threatening without the suit, Antonia.”   
  
Her eyes narrowed and her jaw worked, and for a few seconds he thought she might actually try to punch him even with the rifles trained on her. Then she smiled - really smiled. “You plugged your laptop in.”   
  
Stane laughed for a second before the mockery slid off his face, leaving a sort of paranoid confusion behind. Without taking his eyes off Toni, he pushed the alert button.    
  
Nothing happened.    
  
Toni’s smile grew another fraction. “I was figuring I’d have to get you to march me down to the suit under gunpoint, play whipped and input the kill-code on the software manually. You know, since this is supposed to be a secret facility which probably only has wired networks. Nice of you to handle that for me, though. Did you know that every computer or electronic device that uses a Stark microprocessor has a shared off-switch built right into the hardware? No, I imagine you didn’t, since I never told anybody else. You know, when I built them.”   
  
The lights shuddered, died, switched to the cold, dim blue of emergency lighting. One of the guards must have panicked and pulled the trigger on his rifle, because there was a horrible dry clicking sound that went on and on and on for a good sixty seconds before it broke off with the sound of the gun hitting the floor. Toni was still smiling. “Stark M-79-As. Top of the line. Can’t fault your choice of equipment, but you’d have done better with something retro.” She turned her head, caught the guard reaching for his sidearm and pursed her lips. “They’re pretty stubborn, aren’t they? Screamers, six seconds.”    
  
The world exploded in a horrific, shattering whine of sound that left him clinging to the arms of his chair to keep from falling out of it, the room doing a bizarre dance around him that left the guards on the floor and Toni still sitting there on desk, a blue glow in each ear like some sort of day-glow piercing. “Non-lethal munitions,” she enunciated very carefully, making sure he could hear over the ringing in his ears, and tapped her fingers against the black ceramic under her half-open shirt. “Sometimes a vest is just a vest, Obie, but sometimes it isn’t.”   
  
He fumbled in the desk and came out with the Smith and Wesson revolver he’d been carrying around for years. She looked down at the gun, looked up at him and arched an eyebrow. In the emergency light, her skin seemed to glitter with a faint iridescence. “The FBI are in the building, Obie. You really want to be waving that around when they get here?”   
  
Knuckles turning white on the grip, Stane’s hands shook as much from a deep frustrated rage as from the screamers. Veins throbbing at his temples, face almost purple with fury, he gave an inarticulate scream of rage and threw the pistol at Toni as hard as he could.    
  
A flare of blue light blossomed a half-inch from her skin, deflecting the weight of the pistol a few inches to the right so it clattered on the floor, and she tapped her chest again lightly. “Kinetic barrier. Same thing that makes the Aegis such a tough target. If you have enough power, you can get the emitter segments pretty damn small. You never were a very good engineer, Obadiah.”   
  
He was still screaming - or at least he thought he was - when the FBI burst through the door and hauled him away.   


  


******************************************************************************

  
  
About ten minutes after Pepper had called the FBI, an impressive phalanx of squad cards, intimidating black trucks, and even a helicopter had surrounded the arc reactor complex. Three separate teams of agents in military-grade gear had entered the building, and about a dozen serious men and women in black suits stood around the campus at strategic locations observing everything and talking to their watches.  
  
She had to admit to herself that she was impressed. If she hadn’t been out of her mind with worry for Toni, she’d have almost enjoyed it.   
  
“Miss Potts,” Agent.... Carson? Cole? … was saying in an overly patient voice, “if you wouldn’t mind waiting in the car, it would be a good deal safer. Procedure frowns on letting key federal witnesses get shot.”  
  
Smiling ruefully at herself, she nodded and followed the man’s outstretched hand. “Yes. I’m sorry. I’ve just been so worried. I’m sure your team has everything under control.”  Diplomatic and self-reassuring at the same time. Bonus efficiency points.  
  
By the time he had her into the car, her nerves were starting to fray again. She seriously considered calling Rhodey again to share the pain, but there was point risking getting stuck with obstruction of justice charges just because she was nervous. In the end, she was reduced to sorting the low-priority folder of her e-mail on her smartphone. It didn’t make her any calmer, but it did make the time go faster.   
  
The door opened again, and she looked up expecting to see another agent with - possibly - news, and Toni was there.   
  
Her jacket and shirt were a mess, she was sporting a livid bruise on her cheek and looked as tired as Pepper could ever remember seeing her, but she was there. Alive. Breathing. Sitting herself down in the car, even.  
  
Pepper threw her arms around Toni before the genius had even finished sitting down, phone dropped into her lap and sliding towards the floor of the government-issue black Lincoln. Toni’s warmth and solidity were the center of the universe.   
  
Holding onto her boss for dear life, Pepper started shaking for the second time that day. “Toni, you _maniac._ God.”  
  
“Shhhh.” Toni’s arms were around her, a hand stroking through her hair, and when Toin laughed softly the sound vibrated through Pepper’s body like a warm wind. “All present and accounted for, Miss Potts. They’re hauling Obie’s people off to official custody and the man himself off to the loony bin. The gear’s fragged, nothing there to worry about salvaging. It’s done.” Toni drew her head back and looked at Pepper with tired brown eyes that were still, in spite of their hollow exhaustion, more peaceful than she could ever remember seeing them. “We made it, okay?”  
  
The fear and sense of danger that had been animating Pepper for the last couple of hours drained out of her, leaving her clinging limply to Toni and smiling through teary eyes. She laughed. “Okay. Okay.” Digging her nails into Toni’s shoulders, her smile picked up a manic edge. “If you ever put me through that again, I’m moving overseas. Paris, maybe, and I don’t know how but I’ll get a restraining order that covers the entire country.”  
  
“If you do that,” Toni murmured as she leaned in for a long, deep kiss, “I’ll just have to practice flying under the radar. Besides, I think Paris might be fun.”  
  
“I hate you,” Pepper murmured into Toni’s mouth, hands sliding down under the suit jacket and pulling the smaller woman closer. She was pretty sure she felt an inordinately expensive button or two give way on the silk shirt that was the only thing between her and the black ceramic armor that felt strangely, pleasantly cool under her fingers. “So much.”   
  
“I know.” The soft, throaty sound of Toni’s laugh shivered up her spine, and the kisses danced away from her mouth and down across her jaw. “But let me take you to dinner anyway.”  
  
“Is that what we’re calling it now?” Pepper gave a little breathy gasp as Toni’s teeth grazed her pulse and she tangled long, elegant fingers in a mass of dark waves. “Okay, yes, dammit, I don’t care what we’re calling it.” Toni’s hands started a slow, sinuous, teasing caress down Pepper’s waist and hips, and as the heat between them pulled her desire tighter and tighter she moaned, put her own hand over Toni’s, urged her downward.  
  
A knock on the car’s window made Pepper jump.    
  
“Shit!” Blood rushed to her face. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d forgotten her surroundings.  
  
Toni grinned lasciviously at her, and the redhead had to literally slap her lover’s hands away to straighten her clothes. Without missing a beat, the CEO of Stark Industries and Stark International reached across her secretary and opened the door, smiling up at the man outside with indecent cheer. “I don’t believe we’ve met, Agent....?”  
  
“Coulson. Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.” He was a bland-looking man in a cut-rate government suit, instantly forgettable. “We need to debrief you, Ms. Stark, as soon as possible.”  
  
“Forty minutes, Mister Coulson. My Director of Operations and I need to have a talk about boardroom matters first. Then I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.” Coulson folded his arms, and Toni’s smile only grew. “A private talk. Thank you.”  
  
Then she shut the door - tinted window and all - very firmly and locked it.  
  
An interesting mix of emotions crossed Pepper’s face before she finally managed to get her voice calm enough to form words.   
  
“No. You are debriefing, I am going home to shower, we are having a nice dinner out, and then we can ‘discuss boardroom matters’ and good god could you have a more transparent euphemism?” Cutting Toni’s witty retort off with a sharp gesture, she retrieved her phone from the floor mats, unlocked the door, slipped out. Her tone softened as soon as she was out of handy groping distance. “I’ll see you later, Toni.”  
  
“Aren’t you going to thank me for the promotion?” Pepper shut the door in her face, rather more firmly than necessary, and Toni sat back with a sigh. Then she started to laugh quietly. The world might not be overrun with fairness, but it was certainly looking better than yesterday. She might even button her shirt before the debriefing, just for appearances sake. Then again, maybe not. It might be fun to see if she could get Agent Coulson to blush.  
  
It was at least worth a try.


	9. Epilogue

_Cuisine en Confusion_ was known throughout California--and in certain circles, throughout the world--as the most interesting French restaurant in the Americas. As the name implied, patrons could enjoy food not just from each region of France but also several historical periods. In Miss Potts’ opinion the prehistoric-inspired dishes were based more on imagination than research, but even so they, and everything else on the menu, were delicious.     
  
That wasn’t, however, why the restaurant was Pepper’s favorite. She loved it for the art.   
  
To match the scope of the food, the walls of the restaurant were covered in art ranging from reproductions of paleolithic cave paintings to Renaissance oils to modernist abstract sculpture. Every major period and movement of French art was represented in the dining rooms, some with gorgeous and rare pieces.    
  
She didn’t get to enjoy them until the second night after she and Toni had found Stane out. After the FBI had dragged the man away in handcuffs, Agent Coulson’s de-briefing had kept the two women awake and dressed long after the nicer restaurants had closed for the night and they’d gone to their separate beds exhausted.    
  
Pepper was glad for the day of rest. A night with Toni was something you needed to be in top form to really enjoy.   
  
Toni had gotten them a table for two in the Early Modern section of the restaurant in front of  _[Une etude de femme d'apres nature](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Marie-Denise_Villers_-_Une_etude_de_femme_d'apres_nature.jpg) _ by Marie-Denise Villers. A young, pretty woman in a black dress stood with one foot on a stone bench, looking out at the viewer from beneath the dark veil covering her hair and shoulders, hitching up a white stocking. Pepper had always liked it for the intimacy of the subject’s pose, unconcerned that her clothes were in disarray or her ankles were showing.    
  
It took Toni until well into the second course (a seared white sturgeon with caviar which Pepper adored and Toni had spent six minutes grousing about the fanciness of before taking a bite)  to look up and really  see the painting - Pepper could tell the difference, there was something in the focus of Toni’s eyes and the tilt of her head when she was actually seeing something instead of running her eyes over it and dealing with it in whatever corner of her brain was reserved for day-to-day minutiae - and when she did, she started to laugh. Quietly, relatively discreetly for her, but there was no mistaking it for anything but laughter.   
  
Pepper’s lips quirked up as she set her wine glass back on the table. “What’s funny about the painting?”   
  
“You got that exact same look,” Toni informed her from behind a hand that was no doubt concealing an entirely wicked grin, “right about the time they came in to tell you that it was your turn for the second round of debriefings. When my hand was still....”   
  
Pepper felt her cheeks heating. She told herself it was the wine. “I’m going to make you pay for that, Antonia Stark,” she said, glaring with a devious spark in her eyes. “I’m not above putting hair dye in your shampoo, for example.”   
  
“If it’s blonde,” Antonia riposted in a tone of cheerful warning, “I won’t leave the house for a week. And I’ll need something to do with my hands.”   
  
Taking another swallow of wine, Pepper grinned. “And that idea goes from the ‘punishment’ to the ‘vacation’ column. Don’t worry, I’ll find something suitable.”   
  
Toni’s eyebrow lifted, just a touch. “Subtle?”   
  
Pepper’s grin only widened. “Not even slightly.”   
  
“Oh.” Toni seemed to think about that for a minute, running her tongue slowly over the backs of her teeth, then laughed again - richly, deeply and with considerable anticipation. “I’ll look forward to it.”   
  
Pepper blushed again, and this time it was hard to blame the wine - especially when Toni’s eyes were glittering that way. It made her think about the sureness of Toni’s hands and the soft, urgent hitch of Toni’s voice and the way that her own pulse pounded when....   
  
_Restaurant_ , she reminded herself.  _People. Public._   
  
“Patricia’s already signed the paperwork,” Toni was saying - filling silence or possibly Pepper had actually said something to bring up the topic during her little mental vacation, it was impossible to be sure. “As of Monday, it’s entirely official.”   
  
“She certainly seemed happy about taking over as Chair,” Pepper answered, a waiter appearing at her left with her entree. It smelled delicious and brought her back to the world. After the first exquisite bite, she sighed contentedly. “I’m certainly happy to inherit her staff and stop having to worry about stepping on her toes.”    
  
Toni laughed very softly. “You two always seemed to get along.”   
  
“And you have no idea how much effort that ‘getting along’ took, do you?” The look Pepper took the time to give her boss required delaying another bite of fish, but some things were worth sacrificing for.    
  
A bit to her surprise, Toni actually seemed embarrassed. “I guess I don’t. Think I can make it up to you?”   
  
Her expression softening, Pepper leaned forward to reach over the crisp linen tablecloth and curl her fingers around Toni’s own, skin warmed by mirth and wine. In her green eyes Toni saw a complex blend of thoughts and emotions--affection, vindication, speculation--but most of all she saw a bone-deep certainty.  “I know you will.”    
  
Antonia Stark didn’t blush often, and almost never in public, but the flush of heat that danced over her cheekbones was probably visible across the room. It left her feeling caught out and a little trapped, that certainty, and somewhere in her head a confirmed bachelorette ran screaming from the table. The world must have decided to work a little of its mysterious ways right about then, though, because what her mouth did instead of screaming was curve itself into a ridiculously pleased smile and treacherously induce her eyes to start shimmering with what were not in any way unshed tears. That was her story, and she was sticking to it.   
  
Silences were supposed to be awkward, or maybe workmanlike and focused. This one... wasn’t. Apparently even the social laws of nature were against her on this.   
  
_Damn the meal, the press and the world, anyway._ Toni’s smile widened a little at the thought, a hungry gleam around the edges that she couldn’t have known made her look particularly deliciously predatory, and then she got up from the table and walked around it, leaned down over Pepper Potts with her eyes dancing, licked her lips and purred. “When can I start?”   
  
Then she kissed her, and it was as much a challenge as a surrender.


End file.
